Last Spring, Trudi Abel and Victoria Szabo taught a class called Digital Durham where students took materials from the online Digital Durham archive, as well as primary source materials from Special Collections, and combined them together into Google Earth Map mashups. They used these materials to generate spatial history arguments about particular aspects of Durham’s history and culture, emphasizing 20th century transformations in its physical aspects, human geography, and build landscapes. We called the resulting projects Digital Durham 2.0 to reflect the ways in which students were remixing and participating in creating new views on a database of content.

Digital Durham 3.0 is an effort to bring some of that history to life though augmented reality applications that “rez” the annotations created for the Google Maps into lived experience of the city through online annotations. Users will be able to load up our “layer” and have information about the spaces they are visiting pop up as part of a larger critical narrative around Durham’s history. Later this semester we’ll demonstrate some of this work to the public!